New gasoline specifications and changing markets have led to large and rapid variations of feed stocks and availability of the gasoline. The key factor to boost the profitability is to take advantage of these variations and produce high demand, high value products such as LPG, hydrogen and aromatics.
In addition, because of the population, many countries in the world are in a peculiar situation with great demand for LPG, which cannot be met by conventional resources such as cracking processes employing naphtha, gas oil and the like. The deficit between demand and production of LPG at the end of Indian 8 th plan (1996-97) is expected to be 2.8 million metric tones per annum which is likely to increase to 5.8 million metric tones per annum at the end of Indian 9 th plan (2001-02). Similarly, deficit between demand and production of motor gasoline at the end of 9 th plan is expected to be 1.5 million metric tonnes per annum. Hence, good amount of foreign exchange has to be spent for meeting the demand of LPG as the demand cannot be met by indigenous resources.
Natural gas condensate (NGC), aromatic extraction raffinate and light naphtha are considered as some of the few non economically viable feed stocks in the petroleum market today. As these feed stocks are being non-reformable by conventional catalytic reforming process, they have been considered only as a fuel for long periods. These feed stocks can be converted into valuable products like LPG and Benzene, Toluene and Xylenes (BTX aromatics), utilising the shape selective features of medium pore zeolite molecular sieve.
The aromatic hydrocarbons can be used as high octane blending feed stocks for the production of high octane gasoline. They are also used as feed stocks for the preparation of chemical and petrochemical products.
Aromatic chemicals constitute about one third of the total organic compounds known today. They are important chemical precursors for the production of detergents and polymers among others.
Hence, there is a need to develop a versatile process of the preparation of a novel catalyst which will be able to process cheaper, sometimes unwanted and variably available feed stocks to produce LPG and high octane aromatics.
Therefore, the present invention relates to a process for the preparation of a novel catalyst consisting of Zn--ZSM-5 molecular sieve useful for the conversion of petroleum feed stocks into value added products such as LPG and high octane hydrocarbons.